Antigonick

By Sophokles and Anne Carson

Building off of Rebecca’s post, here’s another very interesting novella in verse. I was chatting with a friend about the new translation of The Odyssey, for the first time by a woman (which I had first heard about from Kinsey), and the friend asked if it was the same author that did this translation of Antigone. It’s not (The Odyssey, which I look forward to reading, is translated by Emily Wilson, in beautifully crafted plain prose), and I had never heard of Anne Carson, so my friend lent me her copy, and I have to say, it blew me away!

Antigonick is only 44 pages (including the introduction, which I highly recommend reading), and I read almost the whole thing on my commute, practically missing my stop in the process. It is not a straight-forward translation; my best description is that it is a post-modern study/satire of the play. The characters reference their own theater, anachronistically quoting Hegel, Beckett, and Brecht. It is also surprisingly snarky for a millennia-old Greek tragedy!

You also don’t need to be fully up on your classics to be able to follow along and enjoy it. I’d actually confused it with Medea, and had a couple of pages of confusion over the lack of dead children before I realized my mistake. While not a strict retelling, Carson quickly got me up to speed, and the humor and cleverness kept it from being a bummer.